Rummaging through my old photo stash, looking for photographs for a travel article I was writing, I came across some photographs I took of my college dorm room. I was rather lucky in college for not having a roommate, ever, and pretty much lived in space luxury for the four years I was enrolled. What this also allowed me to do was "decorate" the room according to my own choice and also skip the whole tie on the door routine.
My craze for the movies didn't just start recently. I cannot pinpoint a day, but I do think that this craze came into full form sometime during college. This should be evident from the photographs posted in this article.
As you can imagine, the entire process of putting up everything was tedious and took time, usually from a week to anywhere around three weeks. I normally would avoid any visitors during this time, considering the entire room floor was covered with posters and cuttings. The cuttings, as you might have guessed were mainly from film magazines, and primarily from Empire.
Once the room was ready, each year I would have a "room warming" party with a few friends which was actually a glorified Movie Night. Considering we were in a small town of Germany where English movies were hard to find, I had to take a 45 minute one-way train to Stuttgart, then walk another 15 minutes to The English Shop (which also had a film rental section) and rent a bunch of movies or sometimes episodes of Friends. The same trip would have to be done again within the next two days to return the films.
Now, the whole decoration part was usually fun, what was not was taking it all down at the end of the semester/year. Imagine how loathsome taking off BlueTac from the walls can be, and then multiply it by 10, and that is how I felt. As you would guess, this was one thing no one ever helped me with :-(
Still, I never regretted setting up my room the way I did. It was a nice little place to mingle and just relax after a hard day of classes. Granted, most people might find it distracting to study in a room like this, but for some reason I did not.
Now, at home where there are a number of personalities living under the same roof, I can only dream about having a room like this. I have been generously allowed to have a few (5-6) posters in my home theater. Someday, I just need to man up and get some posters framed and hang them up... obviously before I do that, I better make sure I go out and buy a nice comfortable couch to sleep on :-)
